Articles and tips from Pepperdine University's IT Technology and Learning group.

Monday, August 18, 2014

Adobe Connect: What Fonts Are Supported in PowerPoint Uploads?

Adobe Connect and PowerPoint: The Fonts that Work (and other options)

by Alan Regan

Adobe Connect is a powerful tool for online teaching and collaboration. A great feature is the ability to import content such as PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, or MP4 videos. Professors commonly import PowerPoint files, but sometimes the conversion looks different than what normally appears on their computers. The most common reason is that a font in the PowerPoint is not supported by the Adobe Connect service.

So what's a professor to do?

There are five options to explore:

Use fonts in your PowerPoint that Adobe Connect supports

Save your PowerPoint as a PDF and upload the PDF

Save your PowerPoint slides as JPEG images to add to a new PowerPoint

Save your PowerPoint as a video (MP4)

Embed your fonts in your PowerPoint

Fonts that Adobe Connect Supports

One of the easiest approaches is to focus your presentation design on core fonts that Adobe Connect supports. Adobe reports that Adobe Connect's hosted service runs on Windows servers and supports the fonts that are standard on those systems. The short list to help professors and instructional designers is:

Arial

Calibri

Cambria

Candara

Comic Sans

Courier New

Georgia

Impact

Lucida Console

Lucida Sans

Palatino Linotype

Symbol

Tahoma

Times New Roman

Trebuchet MS

Verdana

Webdings

Wingdings

If you choose this approach, be sure to limit your use to these fonts. Please be aware, there are often derivative fonts that have similar names. For example, there is a font called "Arial Narrow." These derivative fonts are not supported. Similarly, there may be similar font confusion on the Mac, such as Times vs. Times New Roman. Mac users should select the font names that match the list above. Many of these fonts are provided when a recent version of Microsoft Office for Mac is installed.

Save Your PowerPoint as a PDF

Adobe supports PDF documents in the "Share" pod, so another option is to save your PowerPoint presentation as a PDF. When you save a PowerPoint as a PDF, each slide will be a static "page" in your PDF.

Design Considerations:

Animations and transitions will be lost

Layer multiple bullet point reveals onto separate slides (if you want to focus attention one bullet point at a time)

Layer multiple image reveals onto separate slides (if you want to reveal each element one point at a time)

Embedded video and audio is not supported (you'd upload the video or audio file and share those elements separately)

PowerPoint Instructions:

The following steps are from Office 2013 for Windows. See the links below for other versions of Office.

Once your PowerPoint is ready and designed to flatten to individual pages in a PDF...

File > Save As

Choose the location on your computer and name the file accordingly.

From the "File Type" drop down, select "PDF" (if you have Adobe Acrobat Pro installed, you may be able to select File > Save as PDF directly)

Click "Save."

Preview the PDF to verify that each page appears as you desire. You can then upload this file to your Content area in Adobe Connect or via the Share pod in an Adobe Connect meeting.

Save Your PowerPoint as JPEG Images

Similar to saving your PowerPoint as a PDF, you can also save your PowerPoint as individual JPEG images. Each slide is saved as a single JPEG image and you can then create a new PowerPoint file and insert each image onto separate slides. This involves more time than the PDF method, obviously.

Design Considerations:

Please refer to the previous design considerations in saving as a PDF.

PowerPoint Instructions:

The following steps are from Office 2013 for Windows. See the links below for other versions of Office.

Once your PowerPoint is ready and designed to flatten to individual images...

File > Save As

Choose the location on your computer where you want to save the files.

Save Your PowerPoint as a Video (MP4)

This is a hidden gem in modern versions of Microsoft PowerPoint -- many people don't know that this option even exists! If you want to preserve the full experience of your presentation (animations, transitions, etc.), this may be an option to explore. It does require some design setup, such as declaring the transition time (advance slide "after" time) for each slide. To help with this, you can use the "Rehearse Timings" feature to help set these numbers for you.

Embed Your Fonts in Your PowerPoint

Full Disclosure: This is only an option for Windows PowerPoint (not Mac PowerPoint). Also, results may vary. We list this option since Adobe has mentioned it as a potential solution, but we caution you that we've had mixed results.

This option involves embedding your custom fonts into your PowerPoint when you save the file. While Microsoft Office allows you to embed both TrueType and OpenType fonts, it seems as if Adobe Connect will only support TrueType fonts. Also, since you're including the font within the PowerPoint file, it will also increase the size of your resulting PowerPoint file, too.

PowerPoint Instructions:

Remember, this option is only available for Windows versions of PowerPoint.

Once your PowerPoint is ready...

File > Save As

Choose the location on your computer where you want to save the file.

Name or rename the file.

From the "Tools" drop down near the bottom, select "Save options."

Scroll down and select "Embed fonts in the file" and the desired option (e.g. "Embed only the characters used in the presentation (best for reducing the file size)").